Flipkart-backed super.money eyes neo-bank play in India's fintech race

With 175 million UPI transactions, super.money eyes top 5 neo-bank spot by expanding into credit, wealth and insurance while maintaining cashback-led engagement

Leveraging on its growth on the real-time payments system Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Flipkart-backed fintech firm super.money is planning to expand its footprint in the neo-banking domain and venture into multiple financial services products.

 

The Bengaluru-based company, which will complete one year in July, is targeting to be among the top five neo-banks in India, as the market expands with the growth of the digital financial services ecosystem.

 

“In India, because of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and UPI, there will emerge 10 to 20 neo-banks. We want to be one of the top three to five players... while everybody does mobile banking, how do you truly make it mobile native is the opportunity,” Prakash Sikaria, chief executive officer (CEO), super.money told Business Standard.

 

 

Since July last year, the company has ventured into offering fixed deposits, personal loans, and a secured credit card in partnership with lenders.

 

“We will be doing every other financial services product that a bank does. It could be wealth, mutual funds, or insurance. The good part is we don’t need to be tied up to one banking service, so we try to get the best product for our customers. This is what I think of neo-banking,” he added.

 

Sikaria added that in its current avatar, the company would have a distribution-first approach, a strategy implemented by most fintechs in India. However, he indicated that as the firm grows, there may be a need to manufacture financial products.

 

“Thus far we have not felt the need to go and to create the products on our own. We prefer co-creating. But in future as we go deeper into any of these and the need arises, (we) may,” he added.

 

As of April, the company ranks fifth on the UPI leaderboard, processing 175.24 million transactions, one of the fastest for any third-party application to reach such levels. 

 

Sikaria says the company did well because customers wanted a new platform and it focused on the scan-and-pay market, which refers to peer-to-merchant (P2M) transactions.

 

The company also offers a 5 per cent cashback on every transaction, which coupled with other operative levers, runs into a monthly average cash burn of ₹10 to ₹20 per customer. At present, it is used by 10 million monthly active users, whereas 15 million customers have downloaded the app. 

 

“We never gave activation cashbacks. We rather repurposed it to make it a feature of the product. It has worked in that context… I don't think we need to slow down on rewards. I think what we need to do is we need to rev up our revenue engines to fund those rewards,” he said.